Program

NORMalize is a full-day workshop scheduled according to Singapore time (GMT+8). The morning is an on-site, while the afternoon offers a hybrid format. The organizers will facilitate both the physical and virtual sessions. We have planned the following program:

Morning session

09:00 - 09:10 Welcome & Introduction

09:10 - 10:30 Interactive workshop

10:30 - 11:15 Coffee break

11:15 - 12:35 Interactive workshop

12:35 - 14:00 Lunch break

Afternoon session

14:00 - 14:45 Keynote: Louisa Bartolo

14:50 - 15:00 Towards a Pragmatic Approach for studying Normative Recommender Systems: exploring Power Dynamics in Digital Platform Markets

15:00 - 15:10 Designing and Implementing Socially Beneficial Recommender Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach

15:10 - 15:20 Digital Humanism and Norms in Recommender Systems

15:20 - 16:05 Coffee break

16:05 - 16:15 Improving and Evaluating the Detection of Fragmentation in News Recommendations with the Clustering of News Story Chains

16:15 - 16:25 Enabling Serendipitous News Discovery Experiences by Designing for Navigable Surprise

16:25 - 16:35 NPR: a News Portal Recommendations dataset

16:35 - 16:45 Value-Based Nudging in News Recommender Systems – Results From an Experimental User Study

16:45 - 16:55 Refining deliberative standards for online political communication: Introducing a summative approach to designing deliberative recommender systems

16:55 - 17:05 Classification of Normative Recommender Systems

17:05 - 17:35 Panel discussion & Closing

The on-site morning session is intended for the norm-curious and will allow for knowledge sharing and the creation of a shared vocabulary that can facilitate research collaborations. Attendees learn about normative thinking principles. They then break into groups to discuss a specific use case of a recommender system, e.g., YouTube or Spotify.. They explore the use, recommendations, relevant stakeholders, and their associated values. The groups debate potential conflicts between values, such as whether prioritizing freedom of speech could encourage hate speech and misinformation? They will be tasked to allocate point system to these values, with each member representing a stakeholder's interest. The session ends with groups envisioning a recommender system that upholds these prioritized values and sharing their findings with the entire workshop.

For the hybrid afternoon session, we invite the norm-active to share and discuss their work. The session begins with a keynote on socio-technical solutions with norms and values in mind. Authors of accepted contributions then pitch their work, focusing on the main ideas regarding norms and values, with each pitch lasting 5 minutes, followed by a 5-minute audience discussion. Adopting a flipped classroom method, authors end their pitches with discussion prompts, seeking audience feedback on specific questions or challenges they faced. For example, the authors could ask:

• What challenges might arise if our approach were to be implemented in a broader setting?

• Do you think our findings will generalize beyond the EU/US context?

We then invite members of the audience to comment on these questions. Finally, we'll conclude with an engaging panel discussion.